Quotes from Jim Trelease

The prime purpose of being four is to enjoy being four — of secondary importance is to prepare for being five.

A nation that does not read much does not know much. And a nation that does not know much is more likely to make poor choices in the home, the marketplace, the jury box, and the voting booth. And those decisions ultimately affect the entire nation...the literate and illiterate.

The more you read, the better you get, the more better you get, the more you like it; and the more you like it, the more you do it.

Children whose families take them to museums and zoos, who visit historic sites, who travel abroad, or who camp in remote areas accumulate huge chunks of background knowledge without even studying. For the impoverished child lacking the travel portfolio of affluence, the best way to accumulate background knowledge is by either reading or being read to.

What we teach children to love and desire will always outweigh what we make them learn.

The single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading is reading aloud to children.

What happened to the classics?" you may ask. "Don't you believe in reading great literature to children?" Nothing happened to the classics-but something happened to children: their imaginations went to sleep in front of the television set twenty-five years ago. Reading a classic to a child whose imagination is in a state of retarded development will not foster a love of literature in that child.

Education is not the filling of a bucket but the lighting of a fire.

The closest thing we have to a "crap detector" is a qualified librarian.

So I ask you: whose job is it in this country to wake up comatose parents? Someone better do it soon because knowing television's potential for harm and keeping that knowledge to ourselves instead of sharing it with parents amounts to covering up a land mine on a busy street.

Children's books, even good picture books, are much richer than ordinary home or classroom conversation

Vocabulary and coherent sentences can't be downloaded onto paper unless they've first been uploaded to the head—by reading.

When someone becomes a teacher, she's like the matchmaker in Fiddler on the Roof. All year long she's trying to entice students to go out on dates with authors—that is, to pick up this book or that book and spend twenty minutes with the author, someone they've never met. The better she knows her students and authors or books, the more successful will be the "matchmaking." But the teacher (or librarian) who doesn't read much will fail for sure.

Allow children to choose the books they wish to read to themselves, even if they don't meet your high standards.

More than nonfiction, fiction forces us to concentrate in order to find meaning, and therefore deepens our engagement and helps comprehension.

When the daily number of words for each group of children is projected across four years, the four-year-old child from the professional family will have heard 45 million words, the working-class child 26 million, and the welfare child only 13 million.

The eventual strength of our vocabulary is determined not by the ten thousand common words but by how many rare words we understand.

What we learn in childhood is carved in stone. What we learn as adults is carved in ice.

The more you read, the better you get at it; the better you get at it, the more you like it; and the more you like it, the more you do it. And the more you read, the more you know; and the more you know, the smarter you grow.

The last thing you want first-graders thinking is that what they're reading in first grade is as good as books are going to get!

In a similar experiment involving reading to fetuses during the two and a half months before birth, DeCasper found the child's heartbeat increased with a new story and decreased with a familiar one.

the great ones—you can still taste them years later, even remember the exact spot where you met them. You can't always put your finger on why they linger with you, but they do.

Instead of educating the I.Q., we need to educate the H.Q., the heart quotient, the matters of truth, love, justice, and compassion. There are two ways to do this. One is through the read life experiences and the other is through literature. Literature has the power to take us outside ourselves and returns to ourselves a changed self.

Background knowledge is one reason children who read the most bring the largest amount of information to the learning table and thus understand more of what the teacher or the textbook is teaching. Children whose families take them to museums and zoos, who visit historic sites, who travel abroad, or who camp in remote areas accumulate huge chunks of background knowledge without even studying.